by Andrea Mara
I pulled on my jacket, reminding myself that if someone was spying on me in the middle of the night, they were hardly still out there, hanging around in the cold. The snow was coming down heavily as I walked out into the front garden and down to the gate. No footprints now – the fresh snow had covered them. At the gate, I stared down towards the bend in the road that led to Alan’s house. Could it have been Alan? If he was in my garden last night, it certainly wasn’t to check if I was okay. But I couldn’t think of any other reason either – despite all that had happened and everything he did to us back then, I didn’t take Alan for a prowler.
I trudged up the driveway and around to the back of the cottage. The garden stretched, long and white and empty, the trees and bushes that lined both sides covered in snow. Through the blur of swirling flakes, the wall at the end was only just visible. I thought about going down there but decided against it – whoever was at my window last night was long gone, not hiding in the undergrowth in my garden.
As I rounded the corner to the front of the house, I found Bert Quinn trying to push post through the letterbox, his task hampered by thick leather gloves.
“Are you mad coming out in this weather,” I said, rushing to take the post from him. “I could have waited a few more days for my credit-card bill or whatever it is.”
“Ah, us oul’ fellas are made of hardier stuff than you young ones,” he said with a wink. His grey moustache had flecks of snow in it, despite the huge navy poncho-type thing that covered him head to toe.
“Will you come in to dry off a bit? You surely didn’t walk up, did you?”
“Didn’t think the van would make it up the hill to you in the snow, so left it outside Alan’s. A little birdie told me he was three sheets to the wind in Delaneys’ on Saturday night – it’s worse he’s getting. I don’t know how young Jamie puts up with him. D’ya see much of him?”
“Alan?”
A smile. “Jamie.”
“No, not at all. But, sure, I’m either in here working or up in Dublin working – that’s all I do.”
“It’s Wednesday you go to Dublin, isn’t it? Not sure you’ll make it this week to be honest, the forecast isn’t great. Your boss is decent though, isn’t she?”
“Is there anything you don’t know about anyone in Carrickderg, Bert?”
“Says Ms Amateur Detective herself,” he said, winking again.
I squirmed, wishing I’d never told him that bit.
“How’re you getting on with the cold anyway?” he continued. “You didn’t freeze to death last night, I see.”
“Still here, just about.”
“I shouldn’t be joking, it can happen. You’d be worried about the old folks, wouldn’t you, and anyone out on their own in the countryside? No harm to check in on people.”
As he tramped down the driveway, I looked down at my post – a flyer advertising insurance and a promotional mailing from a car dealer. I smiled. Every village needs someone like Bert.
Back inside, I sat cross-legged on the couch, a blanket across my lap. Warmer. Calmer. There was nobody in the house, and nobody in the garden, and though the footprints made no sense, they were gone, deleted by freshly falling snow. Time to move on.
My phone beeped, showing a Facebook notification from the Armchair Detective group and I wondered who was posting so early – most of the members had day-jobs like me, scattered across cities and towns in the UK. There was only one other Irish member in the group – amateur sleuthing hadn’t really taken off here, and in my experience people greeted it with ridicule or confusion: Why on earth would you spend your time reading articles about serial killers? I used to try to explain – I’d say it’s not so different to reading a newspaper or watching a true crime documentary. But, yeah, I understood why people thought it was a little odd, and mostly I didn’t talk about it.
I clicked into Facebook to check who was posting – Judith, sharing a new article on the Blackwood Strangler.
It was our common interest in the Blackwood Strangler that prompted us to set up the Armchair Detective Facebook group, and really the group existed solely for swapping information and theories about him. Every now and then someone posted an article on another serial killer, but the unspoken rule was clear – our primary interest was in the man responsible for at least eight murders, the first of which had taken place in the small village of Blackwood Heath, near Leicester in England, some fifteen years earlier. There was always speculation about the gaps between the murders – was he in and out of prison, or in and out of relationships, or maybe serving overseas in the Armed Forces, taking him away from the UK for chunks of time? But that the eight murders were the work of one man didn’t seem to be in question, at least not according to the dozens of articles we’d read and shared in the group.
What are you doing up so early? When I’m retired I’m going to lie in every morning till midday! I typed in response to Judith’s post, glad of the distraction.
I’ll sleep when I’m dead f she replied.
Judith was almost eighty and battling a litany of worsening health problems – her response made me wince. I changed the subject.
So what’s in the article – want to save me a click?
And she did, summarising the story – an old victim, a new theory, a suggestion that a family member had been responsible. I didn’t buy it. It had all the hallmarks of the Blackwood Strangler – the way he scoped out her house in advance, the neighbour who saw someone in her garden, the missing gold pendant that fit with the killer’s habit of taking souvenirs.
Judith said she was going to do some digging anyway, some online research on the family member. That’s what we did most of the time – online searches and looking at old crime scenes on Google Maps. We all knew of amateur sleuths who had tracked down lost witnesses and missing persons, but even when we found nothing the research was addictive.
Some of the group would be sceptical of Judith’s plan – it would be hard to find much on the new suspect after so many years. But, like Judith, I figured every avenue was worth a shot – not all cold cases are solved because of advances in forensics. I looked over at the photo on my living-room shelf, at her long blonde hair and long-gone smile. I knew that better than anyone.
CHAPTER 3
At two o’clock, tired from bashing keys, I came up for air. I’d typed up an unnecessarily long report to distract myself from the footprints and to create noise – the clacking of laptop keys was preferable to silence. My stomach growled as I made my way through to the kitchen, still unnerved. Gurgles and creaks I’d never noticed clanged loud as I put my last two slices of bread in the toaster and inspected the lonely shelves in the fridge. Unless I wanted yogurt for dinner, I’d have to brave the outdoors. The only question was whether or not I could drive.
Outside, banishing thoughts of watching eyes, I trudged to the jeep to take stock. Snow piled against tyres, snow covering the roof, snow completely obscuring the windscreen. Would heat and wipers help? Would it even start? I opened the driver’s door to sit in, but something stopped me. I stumbled back, heart hammering.
Jesus Christ. There was something sitting on the seat.
The jeep door was half open, half closed, and from where I stood I couldn’t make out what was on the seat. Sweating despite the cold, I edged closer. With my right hand I pulled the door open wider, and peered in.
It was a doll. A rag doll. About two feet long, sitting in the driver’s seat, staring straight ahead with button eyes. Dark woollen hair sprouting from its head, its mouth sewn shut with tight, jagged stitches. I stepped closer. The doll was wearing a brown overall-type thing – a homemade dress or some kind of sackcloth, I couldn’t tell. And it was sitting in my jeep, as though it was the most normal thing in the world, only I’d never seen it in my life. How the hell did it get there? Someone playing a joke? A really weird, unfunny joke. I reached out to pick up the doll, but changed my mind. Somehow, though it was just a harmless bundle of rags, I didn’t want to
touch it. Instead, I closed the door.
Back inside, too jittery to work, I buttered cold toast and clicked into Armchair Detectives. There were dozens of comments on Judith’s earlier post, and most were in agreement – this was the work of the Blackwood Strangler. Only one person gave the new theory any credence at all – Barry. Of course it was Barry.
But what if it was someone the victim knew, and he made it *look* like the Blackwood Strangler? It’s not hard to copy his MO. What do you think, Marianne? he asked, tagging me on his comment.
Barry lived in Dun Laoghaire in Dublin, and he and I were the only Irish members of the UK-based group. Barry had discovered the group a month earlier and, realising I was Irish, decided that made us best pals. Mostly he got on my nerves. He had far too much time on his hands and posted about twice as often as anyone else – he was like a needy puppy, bringing titbits of information and waiting for a pat on the head. Sometimes I felt sorry for him, but mostly he drove me mad. I closed Facebook without replying, and sat, listening to the silence.
At twenty to four, when my final call finished, I heaved on my heaviest jacket, locked the front door and, ignoring the jeep with its uninvited guest, plodded through the garden out onto the road. The sky was heavy, a grey blanket signalling what was to come, but for now there was no fresh snow falling. As I followed the narrow road around the first bend, something made me glance back at the house. A movement, a flicker under the hawthorn tree. A blur, there, and just as quickly, gone. I stopped and waited, focussing on the tree. There it was again – a fox. Just a fox, a regular visitor to my garden. I turned towards the village.
Half a mile farther, I passed Alan’s farmhouse, noticing it in a way I didn’t usually when I was driving. The old white paintwork was looking worse for wear, and the tin roofs of the sheds and outhouses were rusty and jagged. The yard was littered with broken machinery, and the Land Rover parked outside the house was covered in muck.
As I looked over, I spotted him standing at an upstairs window. He turned away when he saw me and I shook my head. He was never going to let it go. This was the kind of thing that could go on for generations, until people lost track of what had started it in the first place. I wondered if Alan was disappointed that I didn’t have children – nobody for his son or future grandkids to feud with in years to come. I smiled. Jamie wasn’t as bad as Alan. I got the feeling on more than one occasion he thought the whole thing was daft. Then again, he wasn’t about to go against his dad.
Another mile and a half farther, I rounded the corner and the Carrickderg Arms came into view. An old-school hotel, with a wagon wheel fixed to the gable wall, and a rusty plough beside the front door. Tourists loved it. I thought it was twee.
As I made my way along the slushy footpath towards what Carrickderg locals optimistically called “the supermarket”, I found Mrs O’Shea from the Post Office standing outside on the street, staring at a broken window.
“Marianne, did you walk down? Shockin’ weather for March, isn’t it? God, you must be freezing.” She looked up at the sky, and pulled a purple woolly hat further down over her dark-grey perm. “Out for supplies?”
“Yep, didn’t listen to any of the warnings to stock up, so it’s my own fault. What happened to the window?”
Mrs O’Shea shook her head. “Some gurrier thought it’d be great craic to fling a brick through it last night. I didn’t open up this morning with the snow, so only found it now. Patrick’s on his way.”
Patrick Maguire was a local young garda, and always looked like he was dreaming of solving crimes CSI-style, instead of dealing with speeding tickets and the odd drunken argument in a sleepy Wicklow village. His boss at the station, Geraldine, twenty years older than him, seemed happily resigned to the lack of excitement in Carrickderg and I wondered if it was just a matter of time before the village sucked the soul out of Patrick, replacing it with middle-age spread and apathy. I suspected a brick through the Post Office window might be just the thing to liven up his Monday afternoon.
“Actually,” said Mrs O’Shea, squinting at me through tiny rimless glasses, “you’re a bit of a detective yourself, aren’t you? Would you have any thoughts on who did it?”
For the hundredth time, I wished I’d never told Bert about my hobby. Because Bert told everybody everything. And when it came to my particular pastime, people either misunderstood it completely – as Mrs O’Shea was doing now – or teased me with one-liners from Columbo and Murder She Wrote.
“Well, it’s a bit different,” I explained. “I’m not any kind of real detective. I just look up information about old cases online and try to piece them together.”
She shrugged. “It can’t be that different – though why you’d want to be solving old crimes in other countries instead of real crimes like this,” she nodded at her window, “I don’t know.”
“Ah, what I do is just a hobby – I’d be useless at it in real life,” I told her.
“Here’s the real guard anyway, and about time too,” Mrs O’Shea said, looking over my shoulder. “It’s twenty minutes since I called it in.”
I smiled at her straight-from-TV “called it in” and waited as the tall, gangly guard approached.
“How’ya, Mrs O’Shea, what have we here?” Patrick asked, nodding hello at me as he inspected the damage.
Even to a layperson, it was pretty self-evident what “we” had – there was a brick-sized hole in the glass, a brick in the middle of the window display, and bits of glass on the ground.
“I don’t know what took you so long to get here, Patrick. An old woman like me, home alone when Mick’s out driving the cab – it’s not right for me to be worrying about thugs targeting me.”
Patrick placated her with a nod of agreement. This was about as far as he could get from a CSI-style crime.
“There was a bit of trouble up at the Arms last night,” he said. “An American fella who’d had a few too many flinging glasses around the place. I wonder if it was him? He stormed out of the bar when they told him they were calling us, and had to slink back two hours later when he remembered he was staying there. That’s where I was just now – taking a statement at the hotel. Yer man has fecked off though – he was gone before breakfast this morning. Good riddance.”
“That’s all very well but who’s going to pay for my window?”
“I know it’s a pain, Mrs O’Shea, but I’d say he’s halfway back to America at this stage, or at least Dublin. Have you insurance?”
Mrs O’Shea was shaking her head but it wasn’t clear if it was an answer to the question or general distaste for marauding tourists wreaking havoc in Carrickderg.
“You don’t think he’d have gone anywhere else last night, do you?” I asked Patrick. “Like up as far as my place?”
“I suppose he could have, though I don’t know if he’d have made it all the way up to yours and back within two hours in that snow. Why, do you think you saw him?”
Now Patrick was interested – this was a bit more exciting.
I told him about the footprints under the window and, for the first time, he took out his notebook and wrote down some details. I could feel Mrs O’Shea bristling behind me – my footprints were stealing her thunder. I told him about the rag doll, and Mrs O’Shea made a tsk sound with her tongue – a rag doll wasn’t something to worry about, not compared to a brick through a window. I could see her point, but then she hadn’t seen its creepy button eyes and stitched-up mouth.
Patrick suggested he come up to have a look around outside the house and I was tempted to say no – it all seemed a bit “damsel in distress” – but common sense won.
“I don’t think the car will make it up the hill to your place,” he said. “I’ll walk back up with you.”
The thought of making small talk with Patrick Maguire all the way up the hill didn’t spark much joy, but I couldn’t back out now. He was about twenty-five, I reckoned, a good decade younger than me, but somehow seemed even younger than that. Or maybe I was
feeling old – nothing like chatting to a young guard to make you feel older than your years, especially one with cheeks like a sun-bleached peach.
We went our separate ways for half an hour – me to stock up on supplies and him to write up details of Carrickderg’s crime spree – then met back at the Carrickderg Arms to set off up the hill to my house.
The small talk wasn’t as awful as I imagined and it distracted me, at least for a short time, from the footprints. He told a few funny stories about his training years in Templemore, and a few more about some Carrickderg locals – he didn’t name names but he didn’t have to, you never do in small Irish villages. When he smiled, he seemed even younger, and his clean, shiny face made me think of soap and aftershave. As he talked, I tried to work out what colour his hair was. It was so short I couldn’t tell, but it looked kind of beige. In contrast, his eyes were a deep ocean-blue. Intelligent too, and full of enthusiasm. God love him, but Carrickderg would soon knock that out of him.
Up at the house, I showed him where the footprints – now long covered with fresh snow – had been. With nothing to see, I could sense he was wondering if I’d imagined it, and I could understand why. It was highly unlikely the drunk tourist or anyone else had trekked up through the snow in the middle of the night to look through my window. Yet even as I thought about it, a shiver ran across my shoulders and up the back of my neck. I didn’t imagine the footprints. Someone had been there, and that someone had left a doll in the jeep.
I brought him around the side of the house and opened the driver’s door to show him, standing back to give him space.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“I know, weird, right?”
“What though?”
He stepped back to show me. There was nothing there. Just empty space on the seat, where earlier the doll had been sitting.
